Probably mostly due to the full Moon I only saw eight flaring
geosats last night. One of the ones in the 21:00 RA area got
up to at least +5 for just two or three minutes or so, while
two in the 00:00 RA area got that bright also but stayed
bright for several minutes.
I wonder if a different type of solar panel might explain
the ones flaring three hours before shadow entry. Here's an
illustration of one of the XM Radio satellites that shows the
three-sided shape (three sides of a trapezoid) of the panels:
http://www.hsc.com/hsc_pressreleases/photogallery/xm1/xm1c.html
I don't have any idea which other ones might have that type
of panels.
My consolation for so few geosats was finding Gorizont 14
(17969) and then an unexpected one near it:
87- 40 A 01-10-03 04:43:30 EC 2715.1 0.4 31 87.58 +6->inv
While I was watching it, another one flashed about three
degrees to the east of it in my FOV. As they were both around
-17 declination, my best guess at the moment is that the UNID
was probably GSTAR 3 (19483, 88-081A). I saw only three or
four flashes of this one; two were separated by about 3:32,
and another "split" was about 7:05 (caught while I continued
to time Gorizont 14).
The ISS pass last night was really pretty!
Observing site was 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m.
Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA
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